On the following day while she helped Henry cut the small tobacco crop, while the warm sun undulated through the crisp rain-cooled air, Pius Donahue went through the farm, stopping a short while but bringing no evil news of the night, and she knew that Jasper was safe. A sense of finality came to her with the splendour of the sun and a certainty that Jasper’s words had been real and were undiminished and that his want of her was actual. While she set the tobacco sticks evenly through the field, the physical pain that had bound her throat for a day grew less and went. Jasper came to the field late in the morning. Albert had come, he said, and had stripped his mother of her last earnings, making evil threats. He, Jasper, would not stay another year but he would go away out of the country and search for better land, and when he had found a place he would come back for her, if she were of a mind to go with him, and that was what he had come to ascertain. The sooner he left Wingate’s place the better. She, Ellen, was the best favoured girl he had ever set his mind on having and that surely was a token. He would leave as soon as he could be released without a total loss and they would go. He would take her to his mother’s grave some day after they were gone. It was far past Stonebridge Church and grown in weeds perhaps by this time, but they would make it smooth and decent before they came away, and she murmured that she would plant a flower beside it, a rose or a little clump of sweet williams such as she had seen before the priory door at St Lucy, for they were a fair sight with their round clusters of pink bloom that made a sweet smell all about. When Henry came back from the barn, where he had been to haul a load of the cut tobacco, Jasper said that he must go for he had much to do before nightfall.

‘I aim to hunt out a hollow somewheres to use to fatten the hogs,’ he whispered to Ellen as they stood beside the fence. ‘Some well-hid place off on the back of the farm. A new-styled prodigal, Albert is. He drove off the fatted calf. I taken a heap of pains with that-there heifer, too. Let it suck three months and over. It was my aim to make a high-priced cow that time.’